of the lady but publIcly I must give so , . . , I " lewd an allIance a Jab, mustn t The third letter, at great length, and wIth a courtesy as total as its frank- ness carefull y explains the abuse of trus that \Vhite sees in the older writer's commercial involvement: My other reason is the o?e that every- thing really hangs on: the Importance of a writer's maintaining his amateur stand- ing. . . . I still cling (by my t e.th t ese days) to the notion that wrItIng IS a trust. . . . The next time I come across you, in the mail, in print, I feel I must ?e on my guard, must see what the catch IS, may have to read half way thro g be- fore I can determine whether thIs IS an affiliated utterance or an unaffiliated ut- terance. White's own determInation to re- main amateur and unaffiliated is re- flected in his affectionate, respectful, yet edgy correspondence with Harold Ross. White's value to the young New Yorker waS estimated by James Thur- ber for The Saturday Review in 1938: ('Harold Ross and Katharine .L ngell, his literary editor, were not slow to perceive that here were the perfect eye and ear the authentic voice and accent for their struggling magazine. . . . His contributions to the Talk of the Town, particularly his Notes and Comment on the first page, struck the shining note that Ross had dreamed of striking." Yet the shining-note producer's early notes to the persistent dreamer are gruff and wary and often m il.ed from afar like this one from OntarIO In 1929: , On account of the fact that The New Yorker has a tendency to make me mo- rose and surly, the farther I stay away the better. I appreciate very much YO'l!r extraordinary capacity to endure, and In fact cope with, my somewhat vengeful at- titude about The New Yorker and my crafty habit of slipping away for long in- tervals. . . Next to yourself and maybe one or two others, I probably have as tender a feeling for your magazine as anybody. For me it isn't a complete life, though. The search for the complete life took him out of New York City entirely from ]938 to 1942 and from 1957 to the present, and to Maine every sum- mer from 1930 on: "I would really rather feel bad in Maine than good anywhere else." While remaining a su- premely prized contributor, visible and invisible to The New Yorker, and , identified in the public mind with what is best and blithest about it, White has often asserted his unaffiliated talent elsewhere; his fame in large part rests upon hIS three best-selling novels for chIldren, the essays of the "One Man's Meat" column he wrote for five years in Har p er's his surprising revival and , , revision of an old Cornel1 professor s handbook of EnglIsh grammar and usage ("The Elements of Style," by 'Villiam Strunk, Jr.), and an essay done at Holiday's behest, "Here Is New York." "If I had no responsibili- ties or obligations of a domestic so:t, I would most certainly arrange my lIfe so that I was not obliged to write any- thing at any specified time for any- bod y " White wrote Ross in 1 939, , , after he had taken on the Harper s commitment; though he has felt edi- torial pressure and constraints ( and quit "One Man's Meat" when its w:it- ing seemed only "to fulfill a promIse, or continuing obligation") he has n t passed this feeling on to his readers. HIS readers, instead, feel flattered by the directness of his prose and caught up in its playfulness as his apparently un- constrained utterances gracefully poke toward the light. His quintessentially American style aspires to the very tex- ture of freedom, the unfussy smooth- ness of something growing. "Many of the things he writes seem to me as love- ly as a tree," Thurber wrote in 19.38. This quality, of arboreal self-shapIng, was not unearned; White struggled to keep it, to keep his distance from w at- ever would claim him and crowd hIm, even his beloved and hard working wife, to whom he wrote in 1937 in explana- tion of a year's holiday he proposed to take from magazine work, A person afflicted with poetic longings of one sort or another searches for a kind of intellectual and spiritual privacy in which to indulge his strange excesses. To achieve this sort of privacy-this aerial suspension of the lyrical spirit- he does not necessarily have to wrench t I ! I , : I · I I I 1 , t' I i I , \ .. \- '1. ' .. '" '* '<' 65 himself away, physically, from everybody and everything in his life. . . but he does have to forswear certain easy rituals, such as earning a living and running the world's errands. Most of these letters scarcely touch on literary matters. He mentions read- ing Santayana and Thoreau, and writ s John Kieran a fan letter for. h ; "Natural History of New Yark CIty. He several times casts a skeptical sihling eye in the direction of Hemingway, a fellow-lover of the outdoors and clean prose, and with. easier f aternity con- fides some of hIS professIonal acumen and ambition to Thurber, Frank Sulli- van and Howard Cushman. Cush- ma a Cornell friend who drove with White across the country in 1922, lived to act as his Philadelphia legman in the research for "The Trumpet of the Swan," and never quite dropped from correspondence in between. "Sweet Hum" \Vhite addresses him, and signs , himself "Ho " Thurber, in those years before (in \Vhite's obituary phrase) "blindness hit him, before fame hIt him" offered himself as a partner to , White's sensibility, and received letters unique, among these many, in the r tone of frank, urbane, wised-up ennUI: Sunday afternoons are about the same as when you left, people walking their dog ou t, and the dog not doing anything, the sky grey and terrible, and the L mak- ing the noise that you hear when you are under ether... Even when an artist has the ability and the strength to assemble something of the beauty and the conster- nation which he feels, he is usually so jealous of other artis t that he has .no time for pure expreSSIon. Today wIth I 1 j i \ , i r1llll' - I If' G' t 1 1 ... t', c# t r , ,# , "* ..JY <' *" .v- 4'J , , ':! oJ < __ "" '-If t- ,f .... ((Good evenzng, you sitting dztcks."